Our international patron

Baroness Susan Greenfield is a pioneering scientist, an entrepreneur, a communicator of science, a policy adviser and is considered to be one of the most influential and inspirational women in the world.

She is a Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University and was Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a scientist whose work on the physical basis of the mind has many important implications for our understanding of human behaviour, work and society. From 1998 to 2010, Professor Greenfield was Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the first woman to hold that prestigious position.

Her books include “Journey to the Centres of the Mind” (1995), “Private Life of the Brain” (2000), and Tomorrow’s People: How 21st Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel” (2003). She has “spun off” successful enterprises from her university-based work on Alzheimer’s Disease, created radio and TV programs on science for the BBC and other broadcasters, and recently led a Government “Women In Science” task force. She has received 28 Honorary Degrees, a CBE (2000), a non-political Life Peerage (2001), and the Ordre National de la Legion d’Honneur (2003).

In 2004 Baroness Greenfield was invited by the South Australian Government to be a “Thinker in Residence”, a programme that brings two or three world-class thinkers to Adelaide each year to live and work for periods of up to several months. During her residency, Baroness Greenfield initiated many new projects including the Bragg Initiative encompassing “Science Outside the Square” and the Australian Science Media Centre (based on a similar initiative started at the Royal Institution in London).

In 2005 she received a research grant from the US-based John Templeton Foundation to lead the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind which is dedicated to doing cutting-edge interdisciplinary work drawing on pharmacology, human anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, theology and philosophy.